“Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.” -Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five
It begins with a fever, a low humming in the frontal lobe like breath. A crescendo passes to the lungs where a wheezing timpani drums in five eight. And when the burning reaches the skin from the inside out a tremolo will erupt like a flute, and the canaries will join from the window pane, adept from practicing in coal mines. The melody passes across the limbs in a burnscar symphony of clarinets, double reeds, peeling back like a trumpet’s bell. The violinheart is stammering pizzicato inside a ribcage bowed bass strings. The throat bellows like a french horn until the violins cease with a fermata. They pile the bodies beside the river in long rows of sheet music. Mother’s lay next to children’s corpses—listening to the still humming of their lips, the quiet orchestra beneath their tongues—until their skin too turns cold and damp, slick like an oboe reed. The rest stay inside stale houses where the harmonies don’t catch in your hair, where the saxophones don’t smell like rotting fruit. They exist in silence until, at their window, a finch comes to sing a song of fever.
though she sat curled on the piano bench across the room from him, he was ages away, tangled in bedsheets and sunrise. the morning was never something he deemed worthy of lifting a lid for, so she would spider out of the comforters with twilight, curling into the corners where sunlight never looked. her lips formed around words she wouldn’t say, composing pictures of dawn curling her fingers through his hair, laying her bright cheek down on his cool shoulder blade and tucking her arm around his waist. and laying her head in his hands, dreams breathed her warm sighs along his wrists, while she- buried in curtained shade- was wilting on the piano, watching his mistresses whisper in his ear. she fiddled with a wristwatch, waiting for noon to lift him in his strong arms and carry him out of bed.
We kissed the night before the sky fell with shadows in our mouths, sifting the ash of trees through our fingers. Making ferris wheels from our clouded breath, we screamed with the locusts for a spring that wouldn’t come.
We walked through the dust of cities- the bonesmoke and the rioting masses- burning in our nostrils like a cancer. The streets that used to curve towards the sea lay at the feet of dying seasons, the bitter autumn turning grey, diving over the precipice.
You asked how quickly we could fall.
The doves fell like cinders, their feathers charred. And as we watched the descent, we carved our names in those abandoned streets, leaving desperate fingerprints on the flesh of the rubble, scorched in coal, in churches, in children’s playgrounds.
We gathered the starshards and wore them like peacoats. And lying in that emptiness we found our salvation, scratched into the earth like a message. This time, imperfect, was ours as we lay bleeding into the dark leaves.
But you can have the willow and its sickly limbs like doll’s braids tied with a bow. You can have the burn of a pumpkin spice latte on your lips, covering the kiss that tasted like snow. You can have the bowing of a cello and the greying quiet of the audience, the quiet that says, the music isn’t over until after seven seconds of silence, and when it is Autumn, you can have it Autumn and incorrigibly so. You can have faith, though often it will be tenuous, like the wind through the rye grass in summer before the pressure drops and the sky darkens until you realize tornados are too beautiful to run from. You can have the cadence of the spinal column, so fragile, so impermanent. You can have daydreams script into reality, creaking occasionally in the corners of closets, never speaking above whispers, never stepping out of the shadows except for their eyes that glow like fireflies in the wild. You can speak in Shakespearean sonnets, sometimes, and it doesn’t have to make sense. You can open your grandmother’s urn to see if her ashes taste like oranges and cinnamon. You can't live in sensory overload, but you can have the words silence and deafen wage war until they realize they have the same conclusion. And you can be grateful for skin, the way it stretches like a canvas, half ballet, half ink, grateful for Debussy, for knowing what it is for music to burn, for baths incubating your body back into a wombstate, and for a darker heat, for burning matches, for smoke. You can have the order, the cosmic order, the virgin and the archer side by side in the sky. You can have your father believe you’ll never stop playing with blocks, at least for a while, you can have clovers and inkwells, the blanketing of rainclouds, and bullfrogs outside your window like a swamp song. You can't trust your feet to always guide your steps but here is the sand to teach you how to sink, how to curl your toes, sigh, until you learn about attrition, about entropy, and here are pumpkins, leaves that pirouette, flowers that wither more beautiful in death. And when the seasons fail you, you can still summon the memory of the ghosts in dusting attics of broken typewriters, the small tin of gemstones and arrowheads your grandfather gave you when no one was looking. There is the voice you can still hear in the dark, like your lover’s, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this.
I search for him in the sanguine folds of autumn, under its skin Where flights of crows unfold like leaves Blackened from august brush fires. He smiles and the wind is a pleated skirt’s dance between the trees, Following the road of pumpkin seeds and solidifying dark Until I feel the dusted breath of ghosts, their cold hands like a cage.
I find his eyes, tethered in the eyes of a pagan cat, His voice spun about the branches, bent like the bowing of cello strings. His fingers curl around the trees like dust Around a lampshade; his hair leaves The air smelling like the sweet of swamps and rotting trees, Charred from teenage wiccans and matchstick fires.
I’ve come to sleeping to a choir of bullfrogs Intoxicated by the sickly sound of the locusts I crave. The snails are trailing down the trunks of trees Like the oak-wine of sap that seeps into my skin As I sink into the murk of leaves. The forest is hushed by the October dark.
I wake to the sound of a lark Or a wind chime? I felt the beetles humming at my feet And thought he was near, but the creeping under the leaves Was the footsteps of crickets. He was chasing the sunflowers from the light, twisting my spine To milk the bones- to taunt me- but I wouldn’t tire.
I found his footsteps in the mire around the trees, Curling in the fog of riverbeds, I drank in his darkness With my hands. I lay myself in a bed of soil And twilight, in the way summer lies down to respire At the toes of fall. I was restraining autumn in the cup of my hand, curling It through my fingers like hair, when, beneath the crunch of leaves
I heard a voice, rosegold and warm, pass through the light And dusted air between the trees. He spoke of the way the branches creak And the language of dark. He wore the bones of monarchs like a fragrance And said my eyes were the color of clovers after a thunderstorm.
And when I say my skin crawls just to hear the voice I crave- How the trees whisper our secrets to the leaves At the first sign of autumn- then you will know my Samhain, and you’ll feel our waltz with the dark
